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Every program or task that runs on a computer system occupies a certain amount of processing time on the CPU. If the CPU has completed all tasks it is idle. Modern processors use idle time to save power. Common methods are reducing the clock speed along with the CPU voltage and sending parts of the processor into a sleep state.
In computers, hardware performance counters (HPC), [1] or hardware counters are a set of special-purpose registers built into modern microprocessors to store the counts of hardware-related activities within computer systems. Advanced users often rely on those counters to conduct low-level performance analysis or tuning.
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time that a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer program or operating system. CPU time is measured in clock ticks or seconds. Sometimes it is useful to convert CPU time into a percentage of the CPU capacity, giving the CPU usage.
Performance Monitor (known as System Monitor in Windows 9x, Windows 2000, and Windows XP) is a system monitoring program introduced in Windows NT 3.1. It monitors various activities on a computer such as CPU or memory usage. This type of application may be used to determine the cause of problems on a local or remote computer by measuring ...
An Intel November 2008 white paper [10] discusses "Turbo Boost" technology as a new feature incorporated into Nehalem-based processors released in the same month. [11]A similar feature called Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA) was first available with Core 2 Duo, which was based on the Santa Rosa platform and was released on May 10, 2007.
That is, after some time the clock "drifts apart" or gradually desynchronizes from the other clock. All clocks are subject to drift, causing eventual divergence unless resynchronized. In particular, the drift of crystal-based clocks used in computers requires some synchronization mechanism for any high-speed communication. Computer clock drift ...
The purpose of overclocking is to increase the operating speed of a given component. [3] Normally, on modern systems, the target of overclocking is increasing the performance of a major chip or subsystem, such as the main processor or graphics controller, but other components, such as system memory or system buses (generally on the motherboard), are commonly involved.
For example, an IBM PC with an Intel 80486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast (internally only) as one with the same CPU and memory running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors that implement different architectures and microarchitectures ...